By Dr. Ronnie Floyd

The growth of our spiritual lives will never outpace our intentional commitment to prioritize it every day. Our spiritual development impacts every other area of our lives—and we cannot delegate that growth to anyone else.

During my college years, over Christmas break, my brother asked me to build a barn for him. He is a much more gifted carpenter than I, but he was trying to help me out. I needed the money. But building barns was neither my passion nor within my skill set.

I accomplished the task, but in a few years the barn began to lean and eventually became unsafe. My brother would have been better off building the barn himself than delegating something to me I could not properly do.

Just as my brother should not have expected me to build a barn, you and I cannot expect someone else to build our spiritual lives for us. No one else can construct our daily walk with God. It has to be intentional, purposeful, and personal. Each one of us is accountable to do it ourselves.

The wisest decision we can make each day is this: I will walk with God today. What the Bible says about Enoch has always challenged me. This statement is simple yet profound: “Enoch walked with God” (Gen. 5:24, esv). Could God write this about your life and mine today? If not, why not? What stands in our way? Who is standing in our way?

In reality, no one and no thing stands in our way. The decision is ours. Remember these truths:

God wants to walk with us! Getting our lives in order spiritually and practically begins with the decision to make it our number-one priority.

God wants to have a meaningful relationship with us daily. He never puts us on hold, and we never have to stand in line.

He does not delegate our spiritual growth to one of the angels who serves Him. He is always waiting on each of us to come to Him.

Bringing our lives into spiritual order requires a strategy.

Let me highlight a few ways to be intentional in our commitment to prioritize our spiritual lives:

Reading the Bible Daily

The Bible is God’s Word. It’s what God says to you and me, and to all people. Thus, we need to read the Bible every day.

When the Bible speaks, God speaks. His voice through His Word cannot be minimized. But we can maximize its impact in our lives if we truly understand that what He says lives forever—and put His Word into practice! Through the years, I have witnessed thousands of Christians who live out their faith. Almost without exception, those who read the Bible daily are set apart from the others.

Former trucking magnate J.B. Hunt told me that the Bible was his road map for life. It showed him how to live the way he wanted to live—for God. Hunt drove trucks all over America even before he and his wife Johnelle began their Fortune 500 transportation company (one of the largest in the country). While he lived on the road, the map of our country became important to him. It led him to his desired destination.

But Hunt began his day reading the Bible. It would take him at least 18 months to read through the Bible once, but he read through the entire Bible several times in his life. It was his road map leading him to his desired spiritual growth. If an extraordinarily busy and wealthy man like J.B. Hunt knew he needed to read the Bible and make it a priority each day of his life, surely his example can inspire us to do the same.

This imperative daily discipline helps us become spiritually fit. We cannot be all God wants us to be if we do not read the Bible. It is impossible.

Praying Our Life into Order

Think of it this way: We can go to God anytime, anywhere, about anything. Through Jesus Christ, we have direct access to God.

Since we can go to God anytime, anywhere, and about anything that’s going on in our lives, why not choose to talk to God daily—and often? Create your own system of prayer or adopt someone else’s. If nothing else, make a list of things you are concerned about in your own life, your family, your church, your career and business, your future, your finances, your country, and concerns you have for other people. Pray for them each day and look for God to walk into those situations personally and powerfully. God answers prayer! God steps into the life of the person who prays. He can do more in a moment than you can in a lifetime. Each of us needs divine intervention.

Living an orderly life requires praying our lives into order. This is why I keep my prayer list in the Notes app on my iPad. My list changes continually as I watch God respond to my prayers. And I can easily change my list because of the technology’s simplicity. Find what works best for you, and just do it.

Praying with Fasting

Consider adding periodic times of fasting to your prayer life. Fasting is abstaining from something with a spiritual goal in mind.

“Oh Holy Lord, you are worthy of all of our praises. You reign in majesty above us and are our Lord forever. We thank you for allowing us to be graced by your presence today, hallowed be your name. Accept our love and adoration in Jesus’ name. We are here to pray, almighty God that you will always light our way with your presence. We resist evil and pray that your light will always shine on us. May all people see your glory through us and come to worship you as the living God.”

“The Bible is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold of me.” — Martin Luther

I remember early on as a follower of Jesus, I would hear people reference their desire and ability to go to a quiet place with only their Bible and emerge after four hours refreshed, renewed, and revitalized. If I’m honest, the prospect of this scenario seemed overwhelming and the direct opposite of refreshing. I think this was mainly because of my lack of perspective on the benefits and blessings of a time of studying.

Studying is one of the most important areas in which to figure out a sustainable rhythm. When I’ve attempted to read through the Word with no real plan, I’ve found myself lost, confused, and bored. A breakthrough came when I started to ask the Lord to show me what He desired for me to see. When we read God’s Word, we must continually say, “This is talking to me.” The Bible is not an impersonal story about the past; it is the living Word of God. It is an ongoing narrative of which we are a part. Our hope is to gain insight on life and direction through the revealed Word of God. Eugene Peterson says it best: “The goal of reading the Word is to listen for the voice of the God who speaks.” There is a reason that Psalm 119 refers to the Word of God as a lamp to our feet and light to our path. Scripture helps to guide and direct us as we seek to understand the richness of its truth.

The Bible is filled with reminders of the significance and power that accompanies studying, learning, and resting in the Scripture and precepts of God. Paul teaches in Colossians 3:16, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.” Studying God’s Word allows us to ingest his truth so that it can permeate all of our inner self. When we focus on Scripture, it reminds us of who God truly is and who we are in light of that truth. The Word gives us understanding that helps us to teach and guide others according to God’s principles. Understanding the Word produces thankfulness that causes us to sing and encourage one another with God’s promises.

There are 12 things pastors cannot do–even though pastors are, in my judgment, amazing people. They faithfully serve Sunday after Sunday, often with no desire for recognition or fame. In faith, they can do a lot—

But here are 12 things pastors cannot do…

Read minds. Everybody knows that, but many church members hold pastors accountable for unstated expectations.

Be everywhere. No human being can be every place at once, yet some members still get angry when pastors have to say “No.”

“A total absence of prayer in the church isn’t a likely problem. Maybe a church somewhere out there never prays at all, but I don’t assume that’s happening in yours. I don’t know your church, But I bet there are times you come together to pray. Such praying may sparse and sporadic, but it happens. And therein lies what I think is the biggest problem: not a complete lack of prayer, but too little prayer.”

“To look back upon the progress of the divine kingdom upon earth is to review revival periods which have come like refreshing showers upon dry and thirsty ground, making the desert to blossom as the rose, and bringing new eras of spiritual life and activity just when the Church had fallen under the influence of the apathy of the times.”

Modern people love love. How many romance movies and love
songs could we name? Love sells. Love is enticing. We devote a holiday
to it every February, and our children give each other stale
heart-shaped candies in celebration. Yet, what is love? The world tries
to show us love one way; God, another.

The world draws our eyes into the bedroom — at least these days it
does. Love finds its pinnacle in a bed, says Western culture: two lovers
embracing, staring into one another’s eyes, having cast off the world,
enjoying all the delights of togetherness. The camera need not turn to
parents or to children. It’s Wesley and Princess Buttercup (The Princess Bride)
living happily ever after. The couple is the center of the universe.
Love in this first picture is finding whomever or whatever completes me.
It depends on self-discovery and self-definition, and consummates
itself in self-expression and self-actualization.

This is love as Westerners have understood it at least since novels
and poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth century capital “R”
Romantics. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is typical. A
man and a woman love one another. The laws of society and religion stand
in the way. The man, a pastor, is crushed by those laws. But the woman
casts them off and discovers true freedom and life.

Love as a Black Hole

That’s been the great American love story ever since: him and her, or him and him, or her and her against society, against mom and dad, against religion, against the world. Love doesn’t judge, we say. Love sets free. You can justify anything these days by pointing to love. “If they really love each other, then of course we should accept . . .” “If God is loving, then surely he wouldn’t . . .” Heart plus heart equals marriage, declares the bumper sticker. Never mind the fact that such love imposes its own judgments and enacts its own laws.“The world isn’t interested in the God who is love. It’s interested in love as god.”

Yet a brand of love that shines the spotlight exclusively on the
couple in bed, divorced from all other relationships, perhaps
intentionally childless, perverts biblical love into something barren
and stagnant. It’s a universe that eventually collapses inward on
itself, like a black hole.

We might even say that Romanticism’s story of love can’t help but
culminate in homosexuality, where the self seeks to complete and
complement itself only in itself, its mirror image, two tabs colliding,
two positively charged ends of two magnets, incapable of uniting or
creating a new life. The rallying cry of “diversity” celebrates the
ironic lack thereof in a same-sex partnership.

The world isn’t interested in the God who is love. It’s interested in
love as god. Which is just another way of saying that it’s interested
in love of self because self is god.

Love Grows and Fulfills

The Bible also has an answer to worldly self-love. It offers a
picture of love, or rather, several. It, too, starts with a bed. Adam
beholds Eve and calls her bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. They,
though two, become one.

Yet the camera pans back, and we discover that that bed is set in a
garden, where the couple’s union produces a world of rose bushes and
apple orchards and a mess of children’s shoes by the front door and
swing sets and skyscrapers. Biblical love, it would seem, involves an
expanding universe. It’s not stagnant like a bed all by itself. It has
forward motion and a story to follow. It’s generative. It’s fruitful.

The Bible’s camera pans back further still, ultimately taking in all
creation, all history, and God himself. The first snapshots of love in
the bed and the garden and the parent, snapshots available for viewing
by all humanity, are meant to draw humanity’s gaze upward to even more
magnificent portraits of love.

Love Is Not God

Father, Son, and Spirit together provide perfect picture and definition of love. God is love, and that means all love is from him, through him, and to him.

In this picture, God is uppermost in his own affections. The Father most loves the Son and Spirit. The Son, the Father and Spirit. The Spirit, the Father and Son. He is not the monistic God of Islam, who, before the creation of his world, would have had no one to love and so could not be love. Our God is the one God in three persons, who, in eternity past, shared a perfect and infinite love among these three persons. Self-love and other-love, giving and receiving — somehow — merge in this God who is love.

God is love, and God most loves God because there is nothing better,
nothing purer, nothing higher than God. The Father loves the Son for his
righteousness, the Son loves the Father for his goodness, and the
Spirit loves both for their glory. You cannot have the love of God
without having all the other attributes of God’s character — his
righteousness, his goodness, and more.

Love doesn’t exist somewhere out there in the universe independently
of God. Rather, love is a personal quality of God. It is a description
of his character. It’s part and parcel of everything else about God.

That the World May Know

It turns out, however, that when God is uppermost in God’s
affections, the universe doesn’t collapse; it expands, leading to
another set of images of love. The divine Father seeks out a bride for
his Son. When he finds her, he loves her with a covenantal love. It’s
like the wealthy man who loves the daughter-in-law not because of what
she is in herself, but because she is now united to his son. “All this
is yours and I am your father,” the older man smiles to his
daughter-in-law on her wedding day, pointing to the vast extent of his
estate.

The groom’s name, of course, is Jesus Christ. He doesn’t say, “Her
bone, my bone; her flesh, my flesh.” Instead, he says, “Her sin, my sin;
my righteousness, her righteousness” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
God loves sinners, in other words, by drawing us into the sweep of his
triune, God-centered love. So it’s not just that God loves us. It’s
better than that. It’s that God incorporates us into his love for
himself — “so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them
even as you loved me,” as Jesus prayed to the Father (John 17:23). Once again, giving and receiving merge in the ultimate win-win.

True Love in America

A last picture of love can be spotted among God’s people, the church. As we love one another as Christ loved us — mercifully, forgivingly, obediently — we show the world that we’re his disciples (John 13:34–35). We show the world what true love looks like.

Inside the church, we help each other practice loving God, neighbor, even enemy. We help each other internalize his commandments — one of the most important indicators of our love — so that we too can become purveyors of heaven’s life (1 John 5:3). We strategize to proclaim the greatest message of his love, the gospel (Romans 5:8).

Loving our fellow church members and our non-Christian neighbors means loving them with respect to God.

“Church revitalization will only ever happen in answer to faith-filled, prevailing prayer. It is greatly to the glory of God to revitalize a church of humble, prayerful people. But it is greatly dishonoring to him to suppose this transformation can come about any other way.”